Sunday, July 14, 2013

Smoking Pressed Cheese

It's been a while since I've posted about cheese. To be honest, I haven't had a chance to do much cheese making in the last year or so... between moving multiple times and having a baby, it's kind of fallen to the back burner. However, before all this chaos in my life happened, I did have a chance to experiment with smoking cheese and I wanted to finally share with you how I did it and how it worked out.

I smoked a wheel of Gouda with apple wood chips, but you could just as easily smoke cheddar. After the cheese dried out for a few days, I smoked it using the outrageous, but relatively cheap, contraption you see above. After smoking, I waxed the cheese and aged it as usual. Wow! It worked great. Once I broke that cheese open, the smokiness was subtle but pleasing. It permeated all the way through.

The thing to be careful of here is to be sure it is not too hot outside the day you want to smoke your cheese. The cheese's internal temperature will rise regardless due to the smoke, adding a hot day to the equation can lead to cheese that gets too warm. You don't want it to get so warm that the fat starts to separate!

I used my Weber charcoal grill with a flexible dryer hose attached to the smoke outlet. I epoxied a couple of half inch bolts to the side of a dryer vent clamp. I then used magnets to attach the hose to the grill. It wasn't a perfect seal, but plenty good enough! On the other end, I had a cardboard box that fit a metal cooling rack I already had in my kitchen. I punched bamboo skewers across the corners to hold the cooling rack up. I cut a hole the size of the hose in the side near the bottom and pushed the hose through so that it brought the smoke from the grill into the box. To keep my cheese from getting grooves from the cooling rack, I placed a sushi rolling mat on top of it. Lastly, I cut a few vent holes in the top of the box. Therefore, the smoke comes in the bottom of the box and surrounds the cheese with its goodness on its way out the top. I just held the top of the box closed with a heavy ceramic bowl.

If you've never smoked anything on a grill before, the trick is the soak the wood chips before using. If you don't soak them, they burn instead of smoking. You don't need a lot of charcoal for this project because you don't want the fire too hot (again, you want to keep your cheese as cool as possible). Heat your coals and then sprinkle some of the soaked wood chips on the coals to start the smoking process. Add additional coals and wood chips as necessary to maintain a steady stream of smoke.

Flip your cheese periodically to obtain even smoking and to also keep the fat evenly distributed in the cheese. The cheese does not need to get a lot of color on it to be thoroughly smoked. How long to smoke it? Well, this is a bit of a judgement call. I think I did about two hours and it ended up with a nice smokey flavor. What a great way to add a little extra flavor to your homemade cheese!

3 comments:

Oh, be still, my heart! I have been working up to making cheese beyond ricotta, and smoked Gouda is an all time favorite in this house - we buy tiny slivers for about $5 and ration it to make it last. It's actually my primary objective, so thanks for this tip! I've got my recipes, a press at my parent's house, all the other equipment so I'm just waiting for the weather to cool a bit. Meanwhile, I'll start with a batch of cream cheese for a homemade boursin type spread. I'd love to see more posts about cheesemaking if you are so inclined.

I love Gouda too! My favorite is the 5 year aged Gouda, but I have to buy that... I don't think I could wait five years to try one of my own cheeses! I am actually working on perfecting a recipe for a Boursin type spread. Hopefully, I can post it sometime soon (unfortunately, soon is a relative term for me these days). I made it by accident once while trying to make a different type of cheese. I haven't quite figured out exactly what I did "wrong" before to end up with such a fortuitous mistake!! Thanks for the note. Happy cheesemaking!

Welcome to Cooking From Scratch

This blog is all about making great food from scratch. From the simple to the complex, I like to try it all. There's not much that can't be made at home, better and/or cheaper. I don't get a chance to post as often as I'd like to these days, but I do still post! And if you try something from my blog, let me know how it goes; I'd love to hear from you!

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